In this paper that appeared in the ESOMAR Journal I argue pretesting sould become part of the Creative directors toolkit.
(It is also the subject of the talk on the page 'talk video examples'.)
It’s all in the timing
Rather than block good ideas, pre-testing can help creative directors recognise winning concepts at an early stage and convince clients.
By Erik du Plessis, Millward Brown South Africa
The first pre-test took place when the first advertiser asked his friends if they thought his advertising would work. At that point, his advertising agency no doubt would have reminded him that his friends were neither objective nor representative of consumers. But this experiment was just a short step away from a formalized pre-test.
During the 1950’s, pre-testing evolved to include recall questions, then recognition questions and finally motivation questions. The next big step forward occurred when companies like Millward Brown combined pre-test results with information from their attitudinal tracking database to create a pre-test which was predicative of actual in-market results. The focus on predicting real-world effects was later extended to forecasting in-market sales response.
The two most recent innovations in pre-testing are the increased emphasis on emotional questions, and the development of methodologies capable of measuring multi-media and campaign effects.
In essence, the questions we ask in pre-tests have not changed much in the last half century. We still ask people what they think the advertisement is about, what brand it is for and how it makes them think and feel about the brand. While the scope of these questions may have expanded to better encompass engagement and emotional response, the basics remain the same. New buzz words like ‘engagement’ are being used, but this is mainly just a terminological change rather than a real change in methodology.
Robert Heath is pushing for a Low Attention Processing model which sees advertising being effective if it is not noticed, which is an innovation but an unlikely hypothesis.
Discussions about pre-testing centre on two themes. The first involves research companies explaining why their approach to pre-testing is better. Ultimately however, they generally use similar questions and espouse similar philosophies on how advertising works; thus the real difference lies in the size of each company’s normative database which depends in turn on the size of each company’s client base.
The second theme is advertising agencies explaining that pre-testing “kills creativity”. This argument was probably raised when the first pre-test took place, and has not changed since then.
Empirical
It is unlikely that this situation will change because the research companies that specialise in pre-testing and tracking have empirical evidence which supports the predictive ability of their approaches but advertising agencies are not going to embrace the tool that evaluates their best efforts. Furthermore, clients are not going to allow themselves to be led by the agency’s judgment with words like “Trust us; this ad is too good to be researched.”
What should change, though, is that pre-testing should become a tool of the agency creative department to help them make better decisions faster, save executive time (lower costs) and convince clients, using sound data, rather than judgment only, that the proposed idea will work.
It has long been argued that pre-testing should take place as early as possible in the advertising production process, leading to debates about whether to use storyboards, animatics or the final material. Obviously the earlier the pre-test, the less cost is involved to the advertiser. This moves pre-testing up the production process, but not necessarily up the creative process.
Time
Irrespective of how far up the production process pre-testing is moved, it will still be done after the client has accepted the creative recommendations of their agency (albeit subject to the pre-test). At this stage, the result of the pre-test is threatening to the agency, and provides information too late to assist in the creative process.
Typically, by the time the advertiser’s management is exposed to the creative idea it has already been reviewed by the creative team, the agency’s creative boss, the account service manager, the agency creative review board, the brand manager, and the advertiser’s marketing board. To assemble them for each of these reviews is time-consuming, and if the concept is rejected by any of the reviews, the whole process starts again.
All of these review decisions are based strictly on judgment and experience, because little substantive research has yet been conducted.
Only at the end of this whole process is the quantitative pre-testing invoked, with the threat that the result could mean that the whole process has to start again. No wonder creative teams hate and fear copy-testing. It provides feedback just when a project is about to finish, often forcing hurried reassessment and rework of the creative product.
Poor concept
The objective – quantitative-evaluation of creative concepts should happen as early as possible in the whole process of reviews. Ideally the creative director should have this information when he decides to support the creative team’s proposal as he could then provide all the subsequent review meetings with researched information on which to base their decisions.
These days, where advertising agencies are mostly on a time-based remuneration system, it seems an anomaly to pay them more when it takes them longer to come up with a good concept. In practice, agencies find it difficult to justify high charges for ideas that are rejected, and the real money only starts to flow when the concept is being executed. It makes sense for the agency and the advertiser to have poor concepts rejected early on and winning concepts recognised and promoted as early as possible.
Advertising agencies have tired to solve this by “doing a few groups” but this has exacerbated the problem. No creative concept is powerful enough to survive the nit-picking of a determined focus group and they should be used to generate ideas and insights, not to evaluate them. Even if they are used appropriately, the idea that is most appealing to the creative team is probably not the one most likely to motivate a different group of people – the target audience.
Creativity
The paramount reason why copy-testing should become a tool of the creative director is that advertising requires more creativity than ever before to achieve its objectives. More risk is involved, and it is more difficult to convince clients to accept proposals. The creative director will need more information, not just his good judgment, to convince clients of good ideas.
For this to happen, creative directors need client authorization to request pre-testing of their teams’ proposals before the whole process of review meetings has started.
It might seem an unlikely scenario that advertising agencies, and especially creative directors, will embrace pre-testing as part of their jobs. There are however, at least three good reasons why they should. It will provide information about creative concepts at the earliest point that they are reviewed. It will minimize wasted time by agency creatives but most importantly, it will improve the agency’s ability to recognise and to sell good creative concepts.
